I’m trying to say this particular thing, only I don’t know what it is, only I have this sense that I will know it if I say it, only I don’t believe I’ll ever say it, because it is not sayable, nor is it even anything, but rather fog, in that fog is always, no matter where one stands, elsewhere.
The first time it happened, I swore I’d never do that again. I hadn’t expected it, hadn’t even known it was possible. I was in the downstairs bathroom—which wasn’t downstairs at all but on the main floor—and immediately stopped what I was doing. I was shaking.
The second time was less memorable.
The thing I did to make it happen—the first time, I mean—I don’t do anymore. As it turns out, it’s not a very effective method for doing that.
Of course at the time I wasn’t trying to do anything, since at the time I didn’t know that anything could be done, so this thing I did could hardly be considered a method, a method implying intention.
I believe I was twelve.
Later the process became more directed.
There was another bathroom all the way upstairs which we called the upstairs bathroom.
When I was sixteen, a woman walking her dog surprised me in the park.
I was in my secret place, where no one went, so you can imagine my surprise.
I stood and ran, holding my pants with one hand while running.
Looking back, she must have felt badly, and I believe I frightened her dog.
If you were all the way downstairs, you went upstairs and used the downstairs bathroom.
It wasn’t a wrong thing to do, exactly, it was just something you could never under any circumstance tell another person about and would therefore hold inside yourself in the so-called silence of your thoughts.
Like most things.
One time—I’m embarrassed to admit this—I did it in a way that involved the downstairs couch.
The couch was black and had two large bottom cushions. I waited until everyone had left, then carried the cushions into the downstairs bathroom, which as I’ve noted was upstairs.
In truth I did this more than once.
It felt best when certain muscles were stretched tight, so I experimented with ways to stretch them.
That remark was unrelated to the cushions.
Naturally I had to return the cushions before anyone came home because otherwise someone might see the couch without its cushions and wonder where the hell the cushions had got to.
My mother called the basement the den. It was where the television was.
I’m still not sure what a den is.
The bathroom floor was made of little square tiles which I used to note how far the farthest bit went.
The farthest bit being the first bit.
More than once I was in the bathroom with the cushions and thought, My god, that’s the car in the driveway, only to realize it wasn’t.
Oddly, and this is still true, the farthest bit always landed somewhat to the left. I would look for it in the middle, then remember.
My designs, such as they are, follow a single principle: less is more. This is limited, yes, but striking when it works. Unfortunately I wouldn’t put my latest business card design in the striking category:
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On the subject of cards, here’s one a friend of a friend hands out while traveling in America:
Re-done in my style this becomes:
Makes me want to travel again.
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Then, just for fun, I made this:
For your holiday pleasure, I present How Christmas Was Invented, a play I wrote in about three minutes as Rachel’s nieces stomped on rice cakes, claiming that the resulting crumbs could serve as snow.
The Cast in Order of Appearance
NARRATOR: Me, age forty-one.
CEO: Hannah, age nearly three.
CONSULTANT: Sydney, age five.
REINDEER: Samantha, age five.
The offices of Toys ‘R’ Us. A long time ago.
NARRATOR: Once upon a time, before Christmas was invented, there lived a CEO who was very sad.
CEO appears and makes sad face.
NARRATOR: Why was she sad? She was sad because she was the CEO of Toys ‘R’ Us and had overstocked for Hanukah. So now she was stuck with tens of thousands of toys that no one wanted, which was causing delays up and down the production chain.
CEO makes sad face.
NARRATOR: But then she thought of something great. She would hire a consultant to figure out what to do with the extra toys. This made her happy.
CEO makes happy face. CONSULTANT appears.
NARRATOR: The consultant studied the problem and had lunch with all the key players and then created a Powerpoint presentation in which she outlined the “Santa Claus” concept.
CONSULTANT: “Santa Claus” will give the toys to all the children in the world. He will wear a red suit.
CEO jumps up and down.
NARRATOR: It was a great idea, for it would garner free publicity for Toys ‘R’ Us and give the company significant brand penetration in overseas markets. However, there was just one problem: how to distribute the toys to all the children in the world.
CEO stops jumping.
CONSULTANT: I know what to do. Let’s use “flying reindeer!”
REINDEER appears.
REINDEER: Ney.
NARRATOR: The “flying reindeer” concept made the CEO so happy that she decided to give Christmas bonuses to all the key players, herself most of all. And that is how Christmas was invented.
CEO makes happy face. Everyone jumps up and down.
Rachel and I play a game she invented called The Hate Game. Maybe you’d like to try it. Together with a friend, take turns naming things you hate and why you hate them. The game is over when you run out of things to hate. One nice thing about The Hate Game is that you don’t have to be reasonable or rational in what you hate; you are free to hate anything and everything, without compunction or constraint.
Another game I like is called Conversation. I invented this one. Go for a walk with a friend and take turns choosing, at each possible place to turn, which way to turn. The game is over when you return to where you began or tire of playing. Some clarifying rules: 1) The person whose turn it is decides what constitutes a possible place to turn, beyond the obvious. 2) The decision to go forward counts as a turn.
A friend who grew up in New York on the Upper East Side told me about a game she played as a girl called Furs. She and her friends would compete to see who could touch the most fur coats in a single day. The record was two hundred and five.
Rachel’s friend Sarabeth invented a game called What Am I Thinking? Here one person thinks of something (absolutely anything!) and everyone else asks yes-or-no questions until they figure out what it is. A good game to play during a hostage crisis.
But probably my favorite game, because I’m so good at it, is The Sleep Game. Everyone lies down to sleep, and whoever falls asleep first, wins.
I once worked as a projectionist, showing awful films in awful classes at an awful university. It was a fine job as jobs go, in part because half my friends had the same job and in part because my boss was a drug addict, in the best sense of that phrase, by which I mean that he talked in a demented kind of poetry and turned a blind eye to the increasingly outrageous lies we submitted on our timesheets. (A true story: this man once began a job interview by taking a sniff of glue and offering the interviewee the same.)
But all was not bliss, for one day I came into a classroom to show a film (this was before the students appeared) and made a disturbing discovery. Actually, it took me some time to make the discovery, as I first had to wheel the projector to the back of the room and wind the film through the slot and make sure that the film caught properly. Having done these things, I walked to the front of the room and pulled down the screen so that I could center the image on the screen and be completely ready when the students appeared. This is when I made my discovery.
A line of graffiti had been written along the bottom of the screen. It was the work of a friend—I recognized his scrawl immediately—and this is what it said:
AND YOU KNOW OF COURSE ABOUT THE PROJECTIONIST
What choice did I have? I took my seat in the back of the room and waited. The students appeared a few at a time, sat in their chairs, fiddled with their books, looked this way and that, and then, inevitably, caught sight of the screen.
What followed was the same in each case. The student would look at the screen, look at it a second time, think about it, then slowly turn to the back of the room.
What choice did I have? I waited until the moment our eyes met, smiled a big smile, the kind of smile you see on idiots, and waved.
Timothy Leary said that god came to America in the form of LSD because America was not ready to accept a god that wasn’t a thing.
This explains Christmas, among other things.
The above note is the note that my friend Mickle left for his fiancée Jean in a drunken, panic-struck moment twelve years ago, as I related in an earlier piece which you should now read or otherwise you won’t understand what follows.
Among other things, the note demonstrates how lame my memory is, for I claimed in that earlier piece that Mickle invited Jean to see a play he had written—a claim which as you can see is false: he invited her to have coffee. All I can offer in my defense is that I was thrown off by the fact that Jean neither called Mickle nor had coffee with him but rather appeared months later at a play he had written and sat in the audience with a girlfriend (no boyfriend; hooray!), where Mickle spied her through a crack in the curtain.
Additionally, I was wrong to say that Mickle inverted his name with Jean’s, for Jean’s name, as you will note, is nowhere on the note. This said, the note does give the appearance of being addressed to Mickle, beginning, as it does, with the word MICKLE, capitalized and underlined, so this particular inaccuracy was at least understandable.
The sad truth is that I overheard Mickle tell the entire story the same week I wrote that account, and still managed to get it wrong. Which makes me wonder, as I often do anyway, how wrongly I am remembering things. How wrongly am I remembering things?
It’s probably better I can’t answer that question.
» Man Marries Barbie Doll
» Man, One-armed, Caught Drunk-Driving While on Cell Phone
» Man Has Wife Arrested So She Misses Divorce Hearing
» Man Robs Self
Pictured are eleven of Microsoft’s first thirteen employees (thanks bitstream). My idea (a funny one, I thought) was to give them scurrilous nicknames and scribble obscenities on their foreheads—basically deface the image in any way I could, and in the most adolescent manner possible, similar to what folks have been doing to the Britney-as-Elvis posters—only I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Not out of sorrow, as the poet says, but in wonder.
Something from something that never became anything:
He hadn’t realized they could be this roomy. Certainly he’d noticed differences before, but not like this. It feels like the vagina of a considerably larger species. Recalls K saying she had once tried to have sex with a guy whose penis was the size and shape of a soda can. Thinks tried because the damn thing wouldn’t fit anywhere, not vagina nor mouth (forget about butt!), so that in the end she was forced to use both hands, fingers part-way interlocked—one alone being insufficient to give the man solace.
And also this:
He sees K’s labia, if that what it’s called, the folds. Shameful how he doesn’t know the names of things. Can only identify perhaps five trees, five birds. Can see it there, whatever it’s called, in his head, but cannot describe it. Sees it but cannot describe it. Ah yes, like the underside of a elephant’s foot, if foot is what that part of an elephant is called. As opposed to paw. Only this wouldn’t describe it for anyone else, not even a person familiar with elephants. Can’t remember J’s, except in terms of what it wasn’t, what they weren’t. They weren’t the flappy kind. Some women have the flappy kind. A book should be written.
I never intended to read her journal. This is important. I did not enter her room with the intention of finding her journal so that I could read it. Admittedly, this does not exonerate me of anything; however, I believe that my lack of premeditation places the crime in a somewhat less serious category.
So goes excuse #1.
Excuse #2: She did not need to leave the journal in plain view. Again, I don’t mean to claim that I was justified in reading it; far from it; I mean only to say that had she not left the journal on her night table, I never would have read it. The logic here is that, again, I did not seek out the journal but rather fell prey to its temptations.
I am not, I hasten to add, blaming the victim. The victim is innocent and I am guilty. My point, however, and I realize that I have already said this in several ways, is that I am not in the habit of reading people’s journals and that it took an unusual circumstance to get me to do so.
A bit of exposition. This happened over twenty years ago, while I was spending a few weeks in a different city, visiting an old friend.
Actually, wait, there’s excuse #3: I was young and didn’t know better.
But to continue. My friend had a roommate Molly, and Molly was smart and beautiful and artsy and so naturally I developed a little crush on Molly, who, it seemed, developed a little crush on me. Right. So one day, after all this nearly unbearable build-up, me and Molly kiss—or make-out, I suppose—which while great isn’t really so great in the sense that it doesn’t seem that anything happens. We kiss for a time and then stop, and that’s pretty much it. After that, Molly’s interest in me seems to wane, although it is difficult to tell for certain because Molly is a hard read and I feel too shy to ask.
The next day Molly leaves the apartment and I go into her room to find a book to read and instead notice her journal on the night table. Right.
This moment is the key moment and yet I have nothing to say about it. I saw the journal, told myself I shouldn’t read it, decided to read it anyway, and sat down to read it, first noting its exact position on the night table.
Excuse #4: I only read the parts that related to me.
Actually these excuses are not excuses but diminishments. I mean to whittle my crime down to its smallest possible size, like in that game one plays where one takes a little piece of food and splits it in half, then splits one of the halfs in half, again and again, until the thing that remains is but a crumb, or even less than a crumb, and basically disappears.
I began from the entry marked with the date of my appearance in Molly’s household and read through to the present, skipping her reflections on other people and other events.
Here I learned, or confirmed, two important facts:
There were no revelations in any of this and yet it was a great relief to know for certain what had happened. I replaced the journal on the night table and began looking for a book to read.
Whatever book I found, it apparently failed to capture my imagination (excuse #5: I was bored), because the next day I read Molly’s journal a second time to see if she had added anything.
By my way of thinking, this return trip falls into a different, more serious category, for I now knew how Molly felt and thus had no excuse (excuse #6: I didn’t know how Molly felt) for reading her journal.
Excuse #7, apropos of nothing: People do worse things.
Excuse #8: At least I’m being honest about it, for the most part.
At any rate, Molly had in fact added a bit more: she was experiencing a surge in her feelings for me and was wondering if a second round of kissing might be in order. This was thrilling yet confusing, as Molly hadn’t done anything to indicate such feelings in person. Guilt struck (excuse #9: I feel guilt and thus cannot be considered a monster) with the realization that I now knew something I wasn’t supposed to know. This is in contrast to the first reading, which merely confirmed certain suspicions.
Perhaps due to the awkward circumstance of knowing Molly’s secret, I did not kiss her that night (excuse #10: I suffered for my crime), and then the next morning I returned to her journal for the third and last time. Here is what I found written there:
Michael, I know that you are reading my journal because I am reading yours. I don’t want to do this anymore. Truce.
Excuse #11: She was doing it too for christsake, so fucking shoot me.
photo: Pamela Cobb
Four general points before we begin:
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INNER FRONT MESH POCKET
» Bee sting kit
My father, a pharmacist, once told me I would die if I was ever stung by a bee and didn’t receive medical attention in twenty-four hours. Crazy as this sounds, it is probably true, for the one time I was stung, my arm blew up to twice its size and my eyes watered like mad and I had a hard time breathing.
» Swiss Army knife
What am I going to do the next time I fly? In the past I’ve always carried my Swiss Army knife onto the plane (a result of carrying my bag onto the plane). However, post 9/11 this is no longer possible. The key question is: Will they allow me to pack the knife in a checked bag? If not, I’d be wise to leave it at home, for otherwise security is going to throw it in a big pile of box cutters.
» Rachel’s keys
We’ve been together nearly eight months now, and the apartment key exchange happened at about the four-month mark. However I still prefer ringing her buzzer and having her come downstairs to let me in, as this seems less intrusive.
» Work key
Although I only work there one day a week, I was given an office key. I haven’t actually used it yet, except for this one time that I was the last one to leave and locked the door and then realized I had forgotten my sweater.
» Emergency fingernail clipper
Given how I feel about my fingernails, it’s a comfort to know this is here.
PEN SLOT
» Two pens
I’m infuriated by how these Uniball 2mm pens, which I otherwise love, run out of ink in the exact amount of time established by the fuckers at Sanford as the shortest amount of time a pen will last and still not seem quite like a total rip-off.
» Yellow highlighter
Highlighters should be yellow. People who use other colors are wrong.
INNER FRONT COMPARTMENT
» Small collapsible umbrella
Given to me by my mother, who I have hurt deeply over the years for not liking or not using (and in fact often discarding) her gifts.
» Water bottle
The heaviest item in the bag, but well worth it. Not only saves me from buying bottled water, but ensures that I’ve something to drink on the subway.
» Two canvas shopping bags
Given to me by my ex-girlfriend, who bought them in Germany for something like fifty cents each. Never fails to impress the cashier at Prana Foods who otherwise ignores me.
MAIN COMPARTMENT
» Current issue of TimeOut
Finding a weekly magazine with comprehensive, well-organized movie listings transformed my experience of living in New York. It’s the only publication I subscribe to.
» 8.5” by 11” notepad in plastic notepad holder
Purchased the notepad holder, if that’s what it’s called, at Staples. More or less hate the cover, which is over-designed. Still, it’s nice how light and sturdy it is.
FRONT FLAP POCKET
» Two zip disks
One PC, one Mac. Be prepared.
» One floppy disk
Formatted for PC, since this works on both platforms.
» Wallet
No money here; I keep that in the front left pocket of my pants (right front pocket is for credit card, driver’s license, and subway pass). Wallet instead holds business cards along with various membership cards and IDs. Also, in a little zippered compartment intended for coins, a fingernail clipper.
» Work ID
On a chain to be worn around neck, which I hate doing but do anyway because I have no choice.
» Checkbook
I keep checks to deposit under the top flap, folded. Whenever I withdraw money, I look to see if there are any checks under there to deposit. This eliminates having to ever think about going to the bank to deposit checks. Most of my systems exist to save me from having to think about something. I am a lunatic.
» Keys
Color-coded:
Yellow = outside downstairs (think: caution, you may be mugged)
Blue = inside downstairs (think: freedom, you were not mugged)
Green = apartment (think: growth, prosperity)
Red = bathroom (think: emergency)
BACK POCKET
» NYC subway map
I love this map because it shows the entire New York subway system and is laminated. Lamination rules.
» Assorted maps and schedules
Manhattan and Brooklyn bus schedules. New York street map. Philadelphia commuter train timetable.
» 5” by 7” three-ring binder
Address book info (name, address, phone number) printed from a Word document; print-out of email addresses from Eudora; list of all the places I’ve ever lived; soft cloth for cleaning glasses in back flap.
» The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard
The only book I read. I am a lunatic.
SECRET HIDDEN INNER FRONT POCKET
» Rolling papers
A godsend when needed.
» Condoms
An assortment of male and female types. The female ones, in case you haven’t tried or don’t know, fit into a woman the way a trash can liner fits into a trash can (no offense meant), particularly in how the open end, which has a kind of ring embedded in it, encirles the outside of the, um, rim.
My beginning as a legally recognized individual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Bluefield Sanatarium, a hospital that no longer exists.
So begins the brief autobiography John Nash wrote for the Nobel committee after winning the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics (thanks rileydog). It’s a weird sentence, don’t you think? Particularly, it seems to me, in this context: an economist’s Nobel autobiography.
I’ve been thinking a lot about weirdness. Four months ago I did a good thing: I removed all of my business-related information from this site and put it on a separate website (read about that decision in a funny piece I wrote at that time). This simple maneuver freed me, in my own mind at least, to write whatever I wanted, or rather more of what of whatever wanted, whereas previously I felt constrained by what I imagined that people (read: clients) would think. Oblivio has changed considerably since then, as I’ve tested the limits of this new freedom.
Its limits, I should say, are considerable. There are many things I still don’t say and can’t imagine ever saying.
Long ago, as I remember it, although I’m not totally certain this happened, I read a quote from Baudelaire in which he said that if a person (he said a man) could write a book exposing the truth of his or her experience, that that book would by necessity be a masterpiece. My Heart Laid Bare.
Deep down I agree with Baudelaire, although I balk at the price that one would pay for such a work, masterpiece or not. One would lose a lot more than clients. Or I would, at least. Or at least I think would, at least.
Mark Pilgrim might disagree. This is old news to some, but two months ago Mark was fired from his programming job for publishing a weblog in which he posted a rather personal piece about addiction. His boss was concerned that one of their company’s clients might discover Mark’s writing and think the wrong thing, whatever the wrong is, so Mark was told to shut down the site. He refused and was fired. Mark and I exchanged some emails yesterday, and he wrote something that struck me. He wrote that he has thought long and hard about what he might have done to short-circuit the chain of events that led to his firing, and that all he has been able to think of is this: be someone else.
I am a person who feels compelled to be someone else, for fear of the consequences, real or imagined, of being himself. Or this describes the person I have been, to a degree.
I feel this changing, though. And Oblivio has been a significant catalyst. Here, in this place, which isn’t a place at all but just me in front of my computer thinking of what to say and how to say it, I’ve found the courage, now and then, to say a thing I wouldn’t have said before.
A thoughtful young man in Denmark recently wrote to me and said that he had spent an hour reading the site and wanted to thank me for my honesty. My honesty. I nearly cried.
And two weeks after he was fired, Mark Pilgrim landed a new and better job.
So there may be some room to maneuver—room, even, to reveal one’s perversions and rages, provided one keeps it, you know, entertaining and engaging.
I intend to try.
Brooding helps.
As does obsessing over things beyond your control or ability to influence.
Try re-reading the newspaper, looking for articles you skipped the first time around.
Nap.
Write emails that need not be written.
Edit them to eloquence.
Search for ex-girlfriends on the web until you discover that one, a biggie, has returned to her hometown where she is employed in the Budget & Finance department of the local university and serves as a “team member” on the Dean’s Office Feedback project.
If possible, locate this woman’s email address, but do not find any recent photographs of her, however comprehensive your search.
Consider writing to her, and in fact begin several such emails, but then dig up your last letter to her, written four years previous, a letter in which you tell her the story of how your roommate had told you that she, your former girlfriend, had called and had wanted you to know that she was in town for just one day and was sad that she had missed you; a letter in which you tell her how much this had moved you, the fact that she had called after five years of silence, and how it had made you realize what a jerk you had been to harbor bad feelings for so long, and how you had gone to bed that night filled with such happiness and relief, only to discover the next morning that your roommate had been wrong, that it was a different woman who had called, a woman with the same first name as your ex-girlfriend.
Space out.
Make lists.
Remember the first time you had sex with the aforementioned ex-girlfriend and how her recent ex-boyfriend at that time, who also happened to be your boss at that time, appeared at her door in the middle of everything, and how she went out into the hall to talk to him while you stood naked on her bed, not knowing what else to do, and then remember how you listened as they argued about the fact that he wanted to come into her room, only she wouldn’t let him—not for any particular reason, as she told it, but because he had no right to enter her room, and how he kept saying that he knew someone was in there—because he wasn’t, as he kept saying, an idiot—and how she kept saying that although no one happened to be in her room at that time, there was nothing stopping her from having someone in her room if she wanted, and how he kept saying that they both knew who was in there, and how she kept saying that he for one knew nothing, and how you yourself wondered if maybe you should put on some clothes just in case this rather large and angry man decided to storm into the room, because you had a better chance in a fight with him, as you figured it, with clothes on.
Contemplate new shelving strategies.
Also, put on whatever music contributes to a certain melancholic mood focused mainly on a woman who never loved you and whom you never loved, as you would each periodically remind the other, and then discover upon further research that she placed 29th out of 37 entrants in the 34-39 age division of the 2001 Run for Independence 5K.
Calculate that as 10:36 a mile.
Repeat as necessary.
It turns out that Jeffrey Zeldman, who nearly everyone in the web design community knows and loves, stole everything from Walt Whitman.
» Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
» Walt Whitman Presents
Oh Captain! My Captain!
What is a good life?
This question has occupied philosophers since the Greeks, and what we are left with after 2,400 years are three competing theoretical approaches, identified by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons as Hedonism, Desire-Fulfillment, and Objective List. What follows is a brief explanation of each, stripped of nuance and accompanied by photos of Anna Kournikova, who has more personal websites devoted to her than anyone else in the world and who never fails to remind me of this insight I once had, or at least believe I had, which is that men are attracted to women with baby-like features such as soft skin and big eyes (did you know that babies eyes are adult-size at birth?) because men want women who, like babies, are docile and helpless. Speaking broadly.
HEDONISM
Hedonism 
champions happiness. The more happiness you experience, the better your life is. There are actually two schools of thought here, Narrow Hedonism and Preference Hedonism, each with its own definition of happiness. Narrow Hedonism deems happiness a homogeneous state of pleasure, while Preference Hedonism expands the definition to include any state of mind favored by the individual, including pain (yes, pain is happiness, for some). However, the two schools are united in their focus on mental states, which as you will see is a silly idea.
Or maybe you won’t. Here’s a test. Imagine a life in which you are married to some fabulous person who you love and who brings you nothing but happiness, only said person is actually fucking your best friend on the sly. Would you want to a) know the painful truth or b) live your life in blissful ignorance? If you answered “a,” you value something else other than mental states (namely truth) and thus do not subscribe to Hedonism.
DESIRE-FULFILLMENT
Desire-Fulfillment 
theories define a good life in terms of, well, the fulfillment of desire. This is different than hedonism in that one may desire a thing which, when fulfilled, does not produce a particular state of mind. To borrow an example from Aristotle, imagine that you have a child who you love and who you want very much to grow to be a happy and productive adult. Unfortunately, you die while your child is still a child, which is sad, but then many years later your wish comes true, exactly as you wished it. According to Aristotle, this turn of events makes your life a better one, despite the fact that you are dead. That’s right: you need not be alive for the fulfillment of a desire to affect whether your life is, or was, a good one.
Certain Desire-Fulfillment theorists say that only “ideal” desires count toward a good life. What are “ideal” desires? They are the set of desires you would have if you knew everything there is know and had flawless reasoning capacity and weren’t the neurotic bastard you are. This refinement is necessary to account for the fact that people want all kinds of superficial crap. That’s one of the big problems with this approach: people want all kinds of superficial crap. Moreover, certain people are, or can be, immoral, even after going through the “ideal” ringer above, which doesn’t sit well with certain philosophers. This objection can be leveled against Hedonism as well, and it leads to our final group of theories, the Objective List theories.
OBJECTIVE LIST
Philosophers 
flying this banner (Plato was the first) propose an inventory of things that are, to quote Parfit, “good or bad for people, whether or not these people would want to have the good things, or to avoid the bad things.” I have dubbed these the Chinese Menu theories, in honor of their familiar “one from column A, one from column B” format. To be fair, no one has ever proposed such a list; what has been proposed, rather, are various approaches to the question of what general form such a list should take, which if you ask me is no less ridiculous than an out-and-out list, for it merely attempts to hide the ridiculousness by making it too fuzzy to decifer.
The problem is specificity. The more specific the list, the more preposterous, for one can always come up with an account of a good life that doesn’t include any of the items on the proposed list. Vagueness is no refuge, however, for the less specific an account is, the less meaningful. In the end one is left in the unhappy middle, claiming that a good life consists of some combination of certain vaguely stated things.
The philosophers who subscribe to this view are called Realists. Realists believe that value is inherent in the world (as opposed to being created by us), which leads to some really exhausting mental acrobatics once you ask yourself what a world with inherent values would need to look like.
At any rate, and I personally find this inexplicable, Anna Kournikova has yet to win a professional tennis tournament in singles, despite having been ranked as high as eighth in the world. Injuries have contributed to her difficulties, but still.
I was once involved with a woman who insisted on stopping in the middle of sex whenever the phone rang so that she could lean over and check her caller ID. That was weird. I tried to get her to turn off the phone beforehand, without success. She was terrified that someone would call to report an unexpected death and that we would be having sex while this person was leaving a message.
*
This morning I received a call from “Anonymous.” As a rule, I never answer calls from “Anonymous” and only rarely answer calls while I’m eating, which is what I was doing at the time, I was having breakfast with Rachel. However, Rachel, doubtless to demonstrate that we are not coextensive, decided to pick it up.
Rachel (softly): Pardon? … He’s not here. … He died. … Yes, please do that. … You’re very kind. Thank you.
Rachel (to me; triumphant): It was Chase Manhattan. They said they’d take you off their list.
Me: Excellent, thanks. Chase Manhattan is my bank. They have all my money. Now I am dead.
*
Hey, look at this chart I just scanned from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey:
Now you know why Steven Covey makes millions of dollars: he’s screening his calls.
Covey’s makes the claim—and this shook me when I read it, a more or less squandered decade ago—that many of us spend most of our time in Quadrant IV and almost no time in Quadrant II. Granted, the whole corporate-management-caca-as-applied-to-one’s-personal-life thing is terrifying and sick, but the point stands: prioritize.
Which is why I love my caller ID and why if you call me during the day, I will probably ignore you, despite how much I love you, and also why I won’t feel bad that I am ignoring a person I love but will instead feel good that I have avoided the morass of Quadrant IV and have remained in Quadrant II, or at worse Quadrant I, doing the things that need to be done. Said another way, my caller abbr>ID, which cost less than twenty dollars at Radio Shack and stores up to seventy-nine phone numbers, helps prevent me from expending my personal management resources (PMR) on total fucking bullshit (TFB).
Not that your calls are ever TFB, but you see what I’m saying: I’ll get back to you.
Today’s subject is blogs, of which this website may or may not be an example. I mention blogs because I recently realized that I’m just about the only person I know who knows what one is. This of course says something about who I know, or rather, don’t know; I don’t know people who frequent personal websites.
Most people I know use the web for shopping and news and games and perhaps some all-purpose information gathering, and that’s about it. Well, yes, the free pornography. Additionally, a brave few venture to magazine-style sites like slate.com, but almost no one I know visits personal, non-commercial websites, except by accident.
This is not meant as a complaint but an observation. The web is dominated, like everything else is, by corporate interests. Slate is a part of
Nor it is the subject of this piece. That subject is blogs, of which I’ve yet to read a satisfactory definition. Provisionally, then, I offer the following: a blog (the short form of weblog) is a personal web page which is frequently updated and often includes links to other web pages. More or less. Actually, less, for certain blogs have multiple authors.
A few blog-like sites existed in the early years of the web (circa 1995), although they weren’t called blogs (the term was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger) and were little more than a list of links. Blogs exploded in popularity in 1999, due in large part to blogger.com. I’m leery of the word revolutionary, but it seems safe to say that blogger does something astounding: it provides online content management software, software which allows you to remotely update your site without knowing very much about HTML, and it provides it for free. The operative word, in case you missed it, is free. Blogger charges nothing for this service, aside from the courtesy of a link on your site back to blogger, which if you ask me isn’t asking very much.
The process goes like this. You visit blogger.com, choose between one of several blog templates, customize this template how you like, then link it to your site. Now comes the fun part. Still at blogger.com, you type a bunch of text (known as “content”) into a big empty text box, then click on a button marked PUBLISH. Through the magic of what is probably Perl, your text is automatically tranformed into <
Partly as a result of blogger and other related applications, armies of 14-year-olds are posting online accounts of what they did the previous night and who threw up. Armies. It’s an epidemic of who threw up.
Which is fine by me. Not that I so care about who threw up. I care, rather, about the web as a personal publishing medium. That’s what so cool about it. Blogger simplifies this process, free of charge, and that’s why blogger is cool.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is not cool at all, even if their browser kicks the shit out of that other browser, the one owned by AOL, which by the way is also not cool – AOL, I mean – though perhaps slightly less not cool Microsoft, which is so uncool that it deserves to have every 14-year-old in the world vomit on top of its founder’s head.
In case you were wondering.
I’m sitting in the kitchen reading a short story in the New Yorker called Polygamy though I should be in my room working and though I’m not that interested in the story, it’s just something I’m reading, when I hear the front door open and footsteps in the hall and my roommate Lisa appears in the kitchen and I say hi, trying to make the hi cheerful-sounding, only I know it isn’t cheerful-sounding because I don’t feel cheerful, I feel lousy, I have a lousy feeling, I should be in my room working, I should have been in my room working all day but instead I kept doing something else and now Lisa is here and I’m ignoring her because I haven’t anything to say nor the energy to find something to say, and Lisa takes some sort of green or rather greens from the refrigerator and places them in her wooden steamer contraption and runs some water into a pan and sticks the pan on the stove with the steamer contraption above it and it occurs to me that she’s trying just as hard as I am to think of something to say because here we are in our kitchen, the kitchen we share, and we’re not saying anything.
I’m having a birthday party this Saturday, despite not having had a birthday party in, I believe, twenty-two years, and basically hating the whole idea and only doing it out of a pathetic desperation to surprise myself.
When I was kid I loved this day more than anything. My mother, whatever her faults, knew how to throw a party. We’d go to New England Pizza, my friends and I, and eat ourselves sick. That’s what fun is. In later years we’d have a contest to see who could eat the most pieces. One year Howard Skolnick caught Scott Rosengarden spitting out half of his last piece into the toilet, which gave the title to Richard Marcus. Big drama! Another year Anthony Pitcharelli (who later became a champion high school discus thrower and then abruptly went mad, had a nervous breakdown and never recovered, remains institutionalized to this day) ate fourteen pieces. These were small pieces, mind you, but still.
It’s going a kid-style birthday party, without kids. We’ll wear hats and play kids games like pin the tail on the donkey and musical chairs. The motif is smiley faces. Here’s the invite:
I tried Rachel’s patience by changing my mind a million times. But she was steadfast in her refusal to openly advocate for the party. She does that and it’s over. But Rachel’s no dummy; she let me stew in my own ambivalence. And then in the end I decided to do it, telling myself that it will probably turn out to be one of those things that’s a hundred times better than I had imagined, one of those things that makes me realize what a total fucking moron I am for not doing certain things because I supposedly know what they’re going to be like, one of those things that renews my sense of possibility and hope and makes me feel that life has a certain magic that cant be denied or suppressed, despite everything. Anyway, it had better turn out this way because I’ve already wasted $7.97 on the invitations—without counting the stamps!
Still to buy: smiley-face napkins, smiley-face hats, smiley-face plates, smiley-face cups, and a yard-wide smiley-face for decoration.
The menu is pizza.
The frontispiece, if that is the word (although, yes, I realize it is not; a frontispiece is an illustration) of Ron Padgett’s splendiferous (I learned that word from e. e. cummings; it means splendid but sounds a lot fancier than splendid) collection of poems entitled Toujours l’amour, which Rachel informs me means Always Love:
Post-Publication BluesMy first book of poems
has just been published.
It is over there on the table
lying there on the table, where
it is lying. It has
a beautiful cover and design.
The publishers spent a lot of money
on it and devoted many
man- and woman-hours to it.
The bookstores are ordering copies.
Unfortunately I am a very bad poet and
the book is not good.
A man signs a shovel and so he digs.
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